"I don't have no paper"

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It's illogical for someone to say "I don't have no paper" when they mean "I don't have any paper". Two negatives logically should result in a positive, not a negative.

Actually, there's a linguistics term for that, negative concord, and it is even a normal structure in some languages.

Ah, found a reference, http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Negative_concord

https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/ ... /2449/2152

I just want to laugh at that person and say, "That's a double negative, which means you *do* have paper!"
But then they'd look at me as if I was the most idiotic human being in the world.

There's really only one double negative I've caught myself habitually saying, though. It's "can't hardly" as in, "I can't hardly wait to get that new Nintendo game." It's not as obvious as the OP's example but it still makes me feel dumb.

"I don't never have no paper" however, while not considered correct grammar, is logical because three negatives make a negative.

It doesn't sound logical to me.

But then again, people make grammar and punctuation errors all the time. Once upon a time people thought you were very stupid and uneducated if you made even the slightest error in your speech. Now people speak and writer like first-graders, especially online. But if you say anything at all, you're a Grammar Nazi.

Just yesterday I saw a young girl with the words GRL PWR on her shirt. It will be a very dark day when people think that's the correct to spell it!

And besides, it should really be spelled GRRRL, and I can't even turn the "O" into the Roman female symbol if there isn't one.

This is true. In Ancient Greek they would regularly say 'I didn't say nothing' (in Greek of course) in the sense of 'I didn't say anything'.

The Romans, who were more boringly logical, always took the literal route: 'non nulli' (literally 'not none') always means 'some' in Latin.

Slavic languages are also in the same vein; since not only that we're (over)using the double negative, we even say "I'm waiting until you DON'T come"

GRRL is nowadays an acceptable Scrabble word!

What's the world coming to....

I've always enjoyed Latin so much more than Greek.

In Polish it is normal to say "Nie mam żadnego papieru" (direct translation: "I don't have no paper", the "żaden=no" makes the "nie=not" stronger), there is no oddity in it at all. But in English it sounds plain weird. It isn't grammatically correct, is it? It should either be "I have no paper" or "I don't have any paper".
Btw, "żaden=no, any", we have one word where you have two - so if someone paid attention to English rules the direct translation would be "I don't have any paper", but people make mistakes.

I think people wo use that form are just making direct translations from their mother languages, without knowing English well enough.

Last edited by Kiriae on 10 Aug 2017, 3:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

What about "I ain't got no paper"?

That sounds way worse than the pharse in the title.

I once worked with a supervisor(ess), who said to me one day (I can't forget it):

"We dun't got none more of that, becuz, the reason being giz, they din't sent us any." (phonetics added for authenticity)

If you ever feel the need to convince someone that you're a drooling ignoramus, just whip that phrase out, and watch all the eye-rolls.

English, predictably enough, has a few oddities in its use of negatives. For instance:

'I'm not sure that he didn't do that on purpose'

This is a perfectly logical double-negative use (the negatives cancelling each other out), equivalent to I'm sure that he did that on purpose'.

(Although interestingly this sort of double negative use tends to 'water down' the main verb somewhat, so that the sentence more often means 'I rather suspect that he did that on purpose').


On the other hand, the following use doesn't seem at all logical to me: 'I wonder whether he didn't do that on purpose', which essentially means the same as 'I wonder whether he did that on purpose'.


I'm not sure whether I don't need to lie down for a while now.

People like to ask me questions with a negative or two negatives & they get confused whey my response factors in that they used the negatives.

Double negatives are also normal in Spanish but, in English, they are grating on the nerves.

Well...that's curious because I took one of descendants of Latin in high
school.

In modern Spanish ( a Romance language descended from Latin) its perfectly fine to say "no tengo nada!" (literally "I don't have nothing") to mean "I don't have anything".

I used to think of double negatives as being illogical, but then I read linguist James McWhorter who persuaded me that its just a different logic.

Some languages have to be concordant (negatives have to agree with negatives), like Spanish.

And some languages work like a math equation (like standard English) in which a double negative equals a positive (like the square a negative number is a positive number).

English could have gone either way, but around 1700 pedants in England steered English toward its present state of being equation-like. But some regional dialects lagged behind and went the other way (like American Appalachian dialects) and went the concordant route ( I don't got nothin').

Last edited by naturalplastic on 11 Aug 2017, 4:53 pm, edited 2 times in total.